Inspired by The Pillow Book (枕草子) of Sei Shōnagon (清少納言), completed 1002 AD
OPENING WORDS THAT ANNOY
-When I was your age…
-Have you gained weight?
-Have you lost weight?
-Are you familiar with the Gospels?
-Not to be racist, but…
-I don’t have anything against gay people, but…
THOUGHTS THAT ACHE
-Your parents before they became parents.
-The feel of your (now deceased) cat’s head under your hand.
-The last moments of the passengers on a plane, shot down over Eastern Europe.
-That kid’s facial expression when you teased him, back in second grade, not because you had anything against him, but because everyone was doing it and you finally decided to join in.
THINGS THAT CAUSE ANXIETY
-A seemingly ordinary health ailment that won’t go away.
-An almost-disagreement with a sensitive friend you don’t often see.
-Facebook debates.
-You can’t find an important document.
-Having to call customer service with a complaint.
-Having to call customer service for anything, really.
-Your family.
MOMENTS THAT CAUSE JEALOUSY
-An acquaintance has a book published.
-You hear people praising a person you’ve never found particularly interesting.
-Your friend announces she’s pregnant. (Even though you don’t want to be pregnant, yourself.)
-The way your coworker speaks so lovingly of his partner.
WASTED EFFORTS
-Arranging affairs to a subtle degree of perfection for the benefit of one who has no subtlety.
-Staying up late to prepare for a class that gets cancelled.
-Walking very fast to catch a train that turns out to be delayed.
-Thinking up elaborate comebacks to imagined insults.
-Preparing all the ingredients for a dish, only to realize you forgot to get the main item.
-Persuading your friends to include in their party some other friends of yours, then it turns out those friends can’t come after all.
UNPLEASANTNESSES
-Trying to use a pencil eraser that’s gone hard, and it only smears your marks.
-Paper cuts, and also the moment you realize you’re about to give yourself one.
-Cold damp socks.
-Disintegrating wet tissues.
-The sounds of having your teeth cleaned.
-A persistent smell of rot from somewhere in your kitchen.
-Crusty day-old wet cat food.
-The crunch of eggshell in your breakfast.
In the “Hateful Things” chapter Shonagon reveals the long standing of mansplaining: “A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.”
Crap, I gotta read this again – that’s awesome. I remember finding the whole work very evocative and somehow comforting when I read it ~10 years ago.
it always amazed me just how much I had in common with this woman a thousand years and a few thousand miles across the world. I love the lists of things so much.
Just now realizing how much unpleasantness there is in my life
Crusty cat food every day of my life.
Mine never leave any.
Mine prefer to scarf down their food and then barf it up on the rug (always the rug, even though most of the house has wood floors) for me to step in hours later.
My favorite is when I can hear one of them throwing up, somewhere, from my bed in the middle of the night. I just know that no matter how careful I am, I will step in it later.
Most days, for me. Other days, for reasons best known to themselves, they lick the plates clean.
I guess I should be keeping a log so I can develop my ailuromantic abilities.
THANK YOU FOR INTRODUCING THIS TERM TO ME. MY LIFE IS OBJECTIVELY BETTER. Not-sarcasm. Very excited.
Seconded!
Yeah this started off funny but now has legitimately put me in a terrible mood.
This was great. The whole “Things That Cause Anxiety” section here in particular: “You can’t find an important document.” = deep gnawing hole in my soul.
I think I made my own version of this on my old blog, right after reading The Pillow Book in college. Sei Shōnagon: secret mother of the modern internet listicle?? Note to self #1: Read The Pillow Book again. Note the self #2: Destroy all evidence of old blog.
WISH I HADN’T READ THE CAT LINE AT WORK because now there is unshakable melancholy.
This is all so perfect and beautiful.
One of my cats (the most affectionate of my two cats) chose to poop and then later pee on the rug in our living room and while I’m very frustrated about this, that line makes me want to cuddle him so much when I get home.
unshakable melancholy
Yep, here too. 🙁
I have been hugging mine against their will all evening since reading this.
That kid’s facial expression when you teased him, back in second grade, not because you had anything against him, but because everyone was doing it and you finally decided to join in.
Ache is right. Ache that shakes you until your a buried in the rubble of guilt for ever being a dumb 7 year old. Obviously, this is how we learn to be not so dumb but still gross.
This is great. I have loved the Pillow Book since I first read (and wrote a paper on it) in undergrad. Now I’m a teen services librarian, and I was unbelievably thrilled last year when one of the girls in my library book club convinced the others to read it for our next classic. I didn’t even put her up to it!
The first four items under Wasted Efforts bring me great joy, actually. Not sure what this says about me. I think I’m just hoping that surplus of unnecessary effort is adding up somewhere, somehow, and one day the universe will smile and give me a pony for my trouble.
Arranging affairs to a subtle degree of perfection for the benefit of one who has no subtlety.”
ARGH WHEN WILL I LEARN?
this one gets me every time
but ahhhh when they NOTICE you have won the universe
Reading this made me sad: The feel of your (now deceased) cat’s head under your hand.
I still miss my cat Monty, the best Cat Ever.
I miss my dogs who died last year Petey and Chelsea. Beautiful, wonderful dogs, gone to the Great Dog Park in the Sky. Waiting for me there, right?
Damn straight they’re waiting for you, standing there, barely able to control themselves, panting and wriggling their entire bodies in rhythm with your thumping, joyful spirit.
-A persistent smell of rot from somewhere in your kitchen.
WHERE IS IT COMING FROM
I am subletting now and it’s killing me. It might be from the dishwasher? THIS IS NOT MY FAULT.
Always check the dishwasher. That is where my latest Weird Odor came from.
A year later and the place still smells like old lady, no matter what I cook or burn or what. 🙁
🙁 🙁 D:
I mean, I’m sure you’ve done this, but have you tried running buckets of white vinegar through it?
I find that old-people’s mouths smell that kitchens and dishwashers can also get SO HORRIFYING and stomach-turning, and I can’t imagine living with it all the time.
Does it have a stainless steel tub? Mine did and I was a simple soul who had never heard of rinse aid so things got real funky real fast. That might be your issue? Diagnosing with little to no information here!
Mine was the milk steamer on my coffee machine. I didn’t use it for a while, and it had a little milk left up in it, and… urgh. It was not good.
But it’s usually the dishwasher.
-The crunch of eggshell in your breakfast.
*shudder*
Trying to use a pencil eraser that’s gone hard, and it only smears your marks.
GOD, SO ANNOYING
Trying to use a pencil eraser that’s gone hard, and it only smears your marks
ALSO, trying to use a pencil eraser, only it’s been worn down to the metal rim, and instead of erasing, it just scrapes along the paper.
nonononono
Maybe that should go in, “Very Specific Kinds of Unutterable Agony”
MOMENTS THAT CAUSE JEALOUSY –
A friends’ parents just gifted them a new car and I am biting, biting, biting my tongue. I am happy for my friend who now has new independent transportation! I am frustrated for my own transportation situation! I am trying not to let these things intersect! I will not spoil my friend’s happiness with my own sour feelings!
(Things I tell myself while sighing and groaning)
Also this sounds like a book I should read.
My friend comes from a very rich family and so many things make me jealous. When she wanted to get a student loan to buy a car, instead of her parents buying her car, for some completely baffling reason. When her parents paid off her student loan. When her parents paid the tax bill she got for the large uptick in her income that year. When her dad promised her $10,000 if she got a strike bowling, and then she did.
for some reason I find the bowling one the most maddening.
Wait until your friend’s parents gift them a down payment on a beautiful home. You’re happy for them, and it’s wonderful to visit… before you have to return to the tiny apartment you rent.
Oof.
My boss’s boss just asked me if I had lost weight earlier today. I mean, I might have, but it is a little bit inappropriate and makes me feel self-conscious.
In my head I SCREAMED when you described the teeth-cleaning sounds THEY ARE BANANAS AND HORRIBLE and I will now have nightmares
Yeah, I’m still experiencing slight nausea and full body shudders.
MOMENTS OF INCREDULOUS JOY
When The Toast publishes your little homage to The Pillow Book and not only do people like it, they actually know the book in question. <3
*realizes she should actually read the book*
Sei Shonagon KNOWS, man.
There’s an odd little anime, Utakoi, which basically is a riff off the lives of famous Japanese literary personages. There are some goofy eps, but Shonagon’s arc made me BAWL.
Oooh! Looking this up! Thanks!
I LOVE that book! Have read it several times, and never met anyone IRL who has read it.
Alternate bookish solution: My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki references the book heavily, so it’s kind of like talking to someone who has read it.
Unpleasantness:
Realizing barely five seconds after getting out of the shower that you are now covered in lint (and cat hair, always cat hair) from the towel.
Bonus unpleasantness points if this is the first time you’re using said towel after washing it.
The inescapable feeling of being defective,leading the brief drunk feeling of distancing oneself from one’s thoughts. Leading to xanax and the sleep of the unjust.
Or maybe that was just my afternoon.
Is The Toast trying to totally and utterly undo me today? What the actual hell?
This was perfect and poignant! Don’t get me wrong! A little funny at times – funny because it’s true! And a lot sad at times, also because it’s true. (Tara, the cat I got in college and had for ten years and her insistent head under my hand and her big green eyes and the way they crinkled when she closed them and she looked like she was smiling. Aching. Yes.) So this was very, very Toast-worthy.
It’s just between this and writings on homelessness and perfect, perfect essays about stupid essays about sexual assault, I just want to go hide for awhile.
Agggggghhhh, the smell of rot coming from somewhere in my kitchen! Kill it. Kill it.
I’ve torn apart a room from under cupboards to ceiling fan to find the source of a rotten smell and destroy it. My mom thinks our family is genetically sensitive to smells. Apparently I have my great grandmother’s ‘nose’? I think we’re genetically sensistive to THE TERRIBLE FENG SHUI OF ROT.
Agggggh. The rot. No. Hell is a place that smells bad. Whatever else it may be, it smells bad there.
Also this piece is superb. So so good.
This was perfect because it actually made my face into a tight crumple of disgust, regret, and annoyance. Brava!
for some reason the finiteness of this list feels really reassuring and I want to have it in a hardcover book that I can lay on my face in exhaustion as I lay on my couch and contemplate that only these things are the things I have to worry about.
Realizing there is more scalp on the top of your head than hair.
Oh god, the cat line. Oh Captain, my Captain. Best cat there ever was.
Moment that Causes Jealousy:
Your parents praise your younger sister’s enormous academic prowess to you; meanwhile your main accomplishment today is “not crying at work.”
My heart just broke for you!
Arranging affairs to a subtle degree of perfection for the benefit of one who has no subtlety.
Once my friend and I planned The World’s Greatest Birthday for a member of our friend group who just… didn’t care. We planned this bar crawl where he had to guess where the next bar was by solving riddles we had written in the form of rhyming couplets.
He thought it was cool, but not NEARLY as cool as my co-planner and I did (and all of the guests, thankyouverymuch).
Did anyone else read the cat one as a severed cat head and involuntarily shudder? Just me? Ok.
More Heian court everything please! Wherein the men were so busy showing off to each other in Chinese that the women just went ahead and invented Japanese literature, and had as many clandestine lovers as they liked and endlessly anatomized melancholy. Also, Genji, the world’s shiniest dirtbag. More Genji please.
Would you like to cry a lot? About cats? Here is a poem that will make you cry a lot about cats: http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/po…
My boyfriend did that. (He's not even from a particularly rich family! His dad just paid for his older brothers' university educations, because they are from his first marriage and went years ago, when it was much cheaper, and it would be unfair not to pay for all of them. Boyfriend has tonnes of savings and a really well-paying job. I am doing an MA in order to get into the profession I want, and will almost certainly still earn quite a lot less than him. Possibly relevant: his field is male-dominated, mine is female-dominated.)
Two of my friends just bought a flat together, and are now part of the London housing market at 24-25; however, they can do that because the parents of one of them died when he was a teenager, hence lots of money from the sale of the family home. I would much rather be in my situation.
Things that ache:
– this entire blog post and its rightness.
– remembering how young I was when I first saw the movie The Pillow Book and then got the book out of the library and read it in a field.